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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Free, at last!

For a change here's a very very short story of my own:

He’s lost everything; everything that he ever had; everything that he ever loved. And now, he walks around the city streets day and night, dressed in sorrow, thinking of the past; a past full of joy and laughter, gone forever. He thinks about the wasted dreadful years that followed his times of happiness, and about his youth destroyed by the hand of destiny. And he thinks of his present state; a state of despair, and quietly weeps. He thinks and he reminisces. His mind’s eyes are alight with memories; about his lovely loving wife, about his beautiful little daughter, about the friends that one after the other let him down. Once he was a dreamer, now he lives in a nightmare. He feels like a rag. His life is of no importance at all. Oh yes, he feels like a rag that he would like to set on fire; to burn all his troubles and sorrows away. No more worries, no more anxieties, is all that he asks for. He wants to forget, and be forgotten. “Where was I? Where am I going? Who am I?” he wonders as he wanders into the narrow dark side streets of the big city, where only the children of the night, the women of sin and sorrow, hang around. “I myself am nothing but a whore,” he thinks aloud, staring at the women that stand alone and idle at the street corners, waiting for some customer to show up. “I’m even worst than a whore. They only sell their bodies, but I have sold my soul.” He sheds bitter tears. “Why? Why? Why?” he keeps asking himself but of course receives no answer. Only one of those great and almighty invisible gods could explain to him Why; they could maybe give him the reason, the reasons, why his daughter and wife had to die, killed by a hit and run car, carrying them to meet the angel of death. “How unfair!” Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? From the day they died he’d taken on drinking. Alcohol took over their place in his heart. As for a home, he now lived in the streets, a bitter life; he’s a friend with the vagabonds and the damned. He sold everything he had and he became a punctual bum, a drunk who was killing himself little by little, day by day. No, alcohol didn’t help him forget, but at least it soothed the pain a bit. It made it more bearable. And it gave life some color; it made it look somewhat better in his wet and sorrowful eyes. An “angel made” world he once thought that this one was. Now, it is a world full of pain, and in the middle of all that pain, alone stands he. No matter how much he drinks, no matter how bad he treats himself, his sad thoughts never leave him. “I must put an end to this joke of a life, I must find serenity,” he thinks quietly, tiredly. His feet lead him once again, despite himself, at the exact point were all those years ago, his life was blown into pieces, the place where the bodies of his loved ones lay before leaving for the house of no return, six feet under. His face looks like a stream flooding with hot shameless tears; his eyes burn and blur. “The End!” he cries out and runs blind into the street. A passing lorry abruptly shutters the thread of his life into pieces, and sends the now happy man, smiling into the underworld, to meet his loved ones. He is free, at last!